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floggerasks
on slashdot what sci-fi stories are recommended for reading as part
of a teaching class about sci-fi. As
I've read over 500 sci-fi and fantasy books, and own over 300, I've
written up some of the best. Covering history, politics and the best
and worst of human nature, science fiction's freedom opens doors which
remain firmly closed to traditional fiction. It just has to be done
well enough to be believable.
(updated 7oct2009 with fantasy list)

The look into Tiobe
index may give quite a surprising results if we pay attention into
that is happening during the latest year. Java seems no longer
declining, Python and C# are also kind of stable but we clearly observe
the growth of C language popularity. It is even not C++ but a plain C.

Wikipedia recently posted a call for strategic proposals, and one subset
of them looks quite interesting for me - it is a bunch of proposals to
support some kind of the client side scripting. They have a choice
between JavaScript, Flash, Java and Silverlight. After all that at the
end happened with FOSS Java implementation, Java applets seem an
interesting option so let's propose.

To be heard by needed people, this proposal have been uploaded
to Wikipedia
Strategic
Projects space so it
can also be viewed there. It is up to you where to make the comments.

Good command line tools are more important than ever and not just a
relict of ancient times in comparison to RIA or GUI applications.
Experienced system administrators appreciate their power in
sophisticated shell scripts and could probably not manage their
environments without them. The question is how can we make command line
tools smarter and more powerful than today? This article discusses some
ideas and potential implementations always keeping in mind "Do not
reinvent the wheel" and "keep it simple".

XULrunner, the technology behind projects such as Firefox, is both
powerful and obscure. Even getting started with XULrunner is tricky,
and even more so from dynamic languages such as python. pyxpcomext
addresses these issues, and does so from the perspective where the
developer creates a "bundle" which is registered with XULrunner.
XULrunner is then started by the user, and the user opens a magic
URL which triggers loading of the pyxpcomext-based application.

Thanks to the OLPC Sugar team, there is now another way, starting
from the python prompt. "import hulahop" is where it begins.
This article will show and explain the voodoo magic incantations
necessary to bring up a window where you can begin to gain access
to the DOM model of the XULrunner technology. In this way, you
can begin to use technology which was designed for web browsers
but has become something much much more powerful than originally
intended by its designers.

Not somewhere behind the steel walls - in the academic silence of ETH
university Microsoft is building the next generation of its operating
system. Maybe this single department is not the only place where it is
trying – I am more toward thinking this is happening it at least ten
places worldwide.

Those of us in the free/libre and open source software (FLOSS)
community know the routine by now. Despite the fact that "free software"
and "open source" refer to the same software and the same communities,
supporters of "free software" like the FSF
would have us advocate for FLOSS by talking about users' rights to use,
modify, share, and cooperate; open source supporters like the Open Source
Initiative would have us advocate for software by talking about how
securing these rights produces software with "better quality, higher
reliability, more flexibility [and] lower cost."

One reason I tend to stay away from "open source" claims in my
own advocacy is that I'm worried by the way that these arguments rely on
a set of often dubious empirical claims of superiority. Free software,
on the other hand, can be seen as statement of principles. Regardless of
whether we say "free software" or "open source," I've found that a focus
on principled statements is both more robust against counter-arguments
and does a better job of describing the motivations of most contributors.

Abstract: Because AI technology is so life-or-death valuable, not only
for corporations but also for nations and for civilization itself, we
must assume that the most advanced AI projects are being conducted in
secret. In such an environment of presumed secrecy, an OpenSource AI
project like MindForth may have special value in contrast with
proprietary and secret AI.

Wasted and wounded
And it ain't what the moon did
I got what I paid for now
See you tomorrow
Hey Frank can I borrow
A couple of bucks from you
To go waltzing Matilda waltzing Matilda
You'll go waltzing Matilda with me

Otchky-potchky, itchky-pitch
pay attention to this witch
a donkey takes you to a knight
him you conquer in a fight
then you wed a princess who
is even unglier than you
HAHAHA... cockadoodle
the magic words are "apple strudel"

I recently had an opportunity to develop a project in Python. I have
previously had a largely neutral opinion about this language. However
after more serious development I would like to share some doubts.

I will not be talking about the implementation - related issues. Also,
Python do has positive, advanced features that are worth noting. Python
code for the same task is really shorter: you need more C or even Java
code to write something like a = b[:3], and especially b[-1] looks nicer
then b.get(b.size()-1). But when line number rolls over the first
thousand, more things began to matter.

The British Broadcasting Company has made a request for contributions
to an open standard to be made, for the distribution of audio and video,
both offline and real-time broadcasting. Their plan is effectively to act
as the mediator between box manufacturers and content producers, with
themselves as one of the content producers, but definitely not as set-top
box manufacturers.

Challenges faced include an assumption that it is reasonable to expect
ISPs to insert cacheing boxes on their premises, and an assumption that
"downloading" - especially at high speed - is "the way to go". Also,
there is yet again the risk of some idiot content producers trying to
DRM an open standard.

This article will provide some answers to these tricky issues, and
they're not all "Technical" answers. For the most part, the solutions
are psychological, and take comfort in the fact that most users are ordinary
people not interested in blatant copyright theft, they just want to watch
stuff. Ultimately, content producers are going to have to get used to
the fact that they are simply going to have to trust people.

As part of a reorganisation of Pyjamas,
best known as a python port of GWT, dynamic module loading using AJAX has
been added. The deployment of dynamic module loading results in over a 60%
reduction in the amount of javascript cache file sizes, as the
modules can be shared across multiple platforms (GAE pyjamas users
are hitting the app engine limit even with the simplest of apps,
due to the old one-cache-file-per-platform design).

This article describes how the standard technique for dynamic loading
of javascript scripts was used as a basis for bring python "import"
semantics to a javascript compiler. The advantages of individual module
loading - including third party javascript modules - should be clear.

Abstract:
Language acquisition and processing are governed by genetic constraints.
A crucial unresolved question is how far these genetic constraints have
coevolved with language, perhaps resulting in a highly specialized and
species-specific language "module," and how much language acquisition
and processing redeploy preexisting cognitive machinery. In the present
work, we explored the circumstances under which genes encoding
language-specific properties could have coevolved with language itself.
We present a theoretical model, implemented in computer simulations, of
key aspects of the interaction of genes and language. Our results show
that genes for language could have coevolved only with highly stable
aspects of the linguistic environment; a rapidly changing linguistic
environment does not provide a stable target for natural selection.
Thus, a biological endowment could not coevolve with properties of
language that began as learned cultural conventions, because cultural
conventions change much more rapidly than genes. We argue that this
rules out the possibility that arbitrary properties of language,
including abstract syntactic principles governing phrase structure, case
marking, and agreement, have been built into a "language module" by
natural selection. The genetic basis of human language acquisition and
processing did not coevolve with language, but primarily predates the
emergence of language. As suggested by Darwin, the fit between language
and its underlying mechanisms arose because language has evolved to fit
the human brain, rather than the reverse.

The UK Government has made it clear that Open
Source and Open Standards, with a focus on re-use of software
development and deployment, is to clearly and unequivocably be part of
the decision-making for UK Government I.T. procurement and contracting.
Also part of the policy is a clear committment to engage with the Free
Software community and to actively encourage the development of
"Government-Class" Free Software products.